The Echo Dot Is $79.99 Now, and AI Data Centers Are the Reason

The Amazon Echo Dot cost $49.99 last week. It costs $79.99 now, a 60 percent jump that Amazon made overnight with no announcement. Fortune caught the change across Amazon's hardware lineup and got the company to confirm it.

Amazon's explanation is the one every hardware maker is giving this year. A spokeswoman said the consumer electronics industry is facing steep increases in memory and storage component costs, and that Amazon absorbed them for as long as it could before adjusting prices across its product lines.

What went up

• Echo Dot: $49.99 to $79.99
• Echo Dot Max: $99.99 to $119.99
• Echo Show 11: $219.99 to $249.99
• Fire TV Stick HD: $34.99 to $39.99
• Fire TV Stick 4K Max: $59.99 to $84.99
• Fire TV Cube: $139.99 to $199.99
• Kindle (16GB): $109.99 to $149.99
• Kindle Paperwhite (16GB): $159.99 to $199.99
• eero 7: $349.99 to $399.99
• eero Pro 7: $699.99 to $799.99

The cheapest devices took the worst of it. A 60 percent increase on the Echo Dot and a 43 percent increase on the Fire TV Stick 4K Max land on exactly the products people buy on impulse, gift in pairs, or scatter through a house one room at a time. The $30 you now pay extra for a Dot is most of what the thing used to cost.

Ring got a pass

Amazon left Ring prices alone and hasn't said why. Ring cameras and doorbells use memory and storage like everything else in the lineup, so the exemption is a choice rather than a technical necessity. Don't read it as a promise that Ring stays cheap.

Everyone is doing this

Amazon is late to the party. Apple discontinued the $599 Mac mini in May and raised Mac and iPad prices again in June, telling The Wall Street Journal it had never seen component prices climb this fast. Microsoft added $100 to $150 to Xbox consoles and dropped its 2TB configuration. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, MSI, and the Surface line have all either raised prices or quietly shipped less memory for the same money. Roku moved in July. Qualcomm has told customers to expect double-digit chip increases from September.

The memory makers themselves started it. Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix, SanDisk, Western Digital, and Seagate have all repriced as wafer capacity shifted toward the high-bandwidth memory that AI accelerators need.

Amazon is on both sides of this

Andy Jassy told investors in late July that Amazon expects to spend $220 billion on capital expenditure this year, most of it on data centers for AI services. That spending competes for the same memory supply that makes an Echo Dot. Amazon is helping bid up the component and then charging you more for the speaker.

Every company on the list above can point at the same shortage and be telling the truth. The shortage still traces back to decisions the largest of them made about where to put their money.

What to do about it

Amazon has a fall device event coming, so new hardware is going to land at these prices or higher. If you want an Echo, a Kindle, or a Fire TV Stick, check third-party retailers still sitting on stock bought at the old wholesale price, and check Amazon's own refurbished listings. Older-generation units are the only place the previous pricing still exists.